1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a hot melt ink jet printer, and in full detail, a case structure of an ink supplying device of that printer.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, hot melt ink jet printers include a recording head having a nozzle head with manifold nozzles, ink melting units with heaters, and hoppers which hold ink pellets that are solid at normal temperature was mounted on a carriage. The printers were constructed such that character or graphic images were printed on the surface of paper by letting hot melt ink liquid gush out from the nozzle head, while moving the carriage in a direction (of its primary scan) perpendicular to the paper feed direction.
By the way, these printers had a problem of deterioration in the quality of hot melt ink, because, when an operator touches an ink pellet directly by hand when supplementing the ink, the dirt or sebum, if present on his or her hand, might adhere to the ink pellet. The applicant for the patent of this invention, as specified in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/880,411 (incorporated herein by reference) already modified the structure of the conventional printer by installing an ink case, in which color ink pellets for various colors were previously stored separately per color, in an ink supplying section and integrating a top cover covering over the top of the ink case into the top surface of the main frame casing of the printer.
In this modification, if the ink ran short, it was supplemented to the recording head mounted on the carriage simply by moving the carriage to the ink supply position where the appropriate ink pellet in the ink case was pushed downward.
Meanwhile, various types of printers were designed to remove jammed paper easily by removing a cover section covering over the top of the carriage in the event that a paper jam occurred when images were printed on paper by the recording head.
As the above-mentioned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/880,411 stated, the ink case provided on the top of the printer was not removed from the main frame casing of the printer, which posed another problem that the limited opening area over the carriage made it difficult to remove jammed paper.
Even though the ink case was allowed to open and close or be removed, there was another problem that it was more troublesome to open and close or remove and reinstall the ink case in addition to opening and closing the cover as the work required to remove jammed paper.
The achievement in this invention has been made by the efforts to resolve the problems of the previous ink jet printer.